According to recent polling by Ipsos Mori, “almost 4 in 10 say the rules have gone too far and now cause more harm than good and that we need to learn to live with the virus”. Although we read reports of wide support for restrictions, a cursory glance at the world around us – rather than polling data – makes it pretty clear that the vast majority of the country is abiding by the rules in word only.
But amongst the political class we see the Government and its pseudo-scientific advisers repeating the mantra, ‘all pain is good, more pain is better’. They present as faith-addled flagellants, mortifying the nation with knotted flails, self-abasing with fervour. Worse still, the opposition demands that the flails be made of rusty nails and broken glass. No medieval mystic could fail to recognise this impulsive response to a plague. And the press? Listen to the questions at the PM’s press conferences:
“Prime Minister, why do you not force us all to paddle in tar pits?” “Chief Medical Officer, why do you allow us gruel, surely starvation is the only responsible option”. And so the nation descends into penury and a debt burden that those yet to be born will creak beneath.
No wonder then that the unrepresented have been crying out for leadership. No wonder that that pinstriped giant under the hill hears the soft rumbling of Drake’s drum. No wonder that Nigel Farage, whilst enjoying the Lollapalooza that is the Presidential election, straps on his breastplate. This is not some aging roue, pining for his days of adulation. He is responding to the siren sound of responsibility, of someone for whose mailbox has gestated for the nine months of crisis and is now at full term. Has he things he would prefer to be doing? Damn right. But somebody needs to stand up to the lunacy that has affected the national ICU that is Westminster.
We have had a year of too much news. Too much China and its bullying. Too much Brexit, and the Government’s continuous, sinuous attempts to cover itself with the ever-sloughing skin of victory, all the while selling England by the pound. Too much Islamist killing of the innocent in the cities of continental Europe. Too much culture war, statues toppling, history ignored and Marxists dressed as victims, demanding and winning the cowering fealty of the state, corporations, and the media. To top that, too much – way too much – Covid. And worse than the virus itself is the fact that there has been too much knee-jerk, faux scientific authoritarianism dressed, as it so often is, as paternalism.
But one thing there hasn’t been is too much politics here in the UK. Yes, we have had the sight of Sturgeon, with laws to enforce SNP-think at the breakfast table, attempting to breed a generation of porridge-infused Morizovs. In Wales where the First Minister is attempting to reverse engineer Offa’s Dyke, but in England and the UK, there is a dearth of politics. Worse there are concerted attempts to postpone next year’s elections, to go with this years’ postponement of democracy. Right now, we cannot even remove the shower that governs us, at a time when the entire class is held in utter contempt.
Into the fray enters Nigel Farage, Richard Tice and Reform UK, or the Brexit Party as it is still officially known.
Reform UK is picking up where the Brexit Party left off. BXP as it is known to its supporters, went into mothballs in December after an election which looked to all intents and purposes had achieved its aims. Brexit was happening and its key aim was achieved. It had always had a broader agenda, the wholesale reform of our political systems, reform of the House of Lords, alteration of the voting system to tackle the problem of postal voting, and the rest. On Covid, our most pressing problem, it takes as its lead the Great Barrington Declaration, a cool draft of sanity in this fervid world.
What it isn’t, is a new platform for Nigel Farage to self-aggrandise or to get himself back on our screens. Put it plainly, he is livid at the constant betrayals of Brexit by Boris and his team, and woe betide any Tory ogvernment that thinks that losing 10-20% of its support is manageable. But he and we are also livid at the abject betrayal of the country and its interests in a headlong rush to defeat the undefeatable virus.
But the Government feels the need to close us down and, in the absence of rational thought, pretend that the only evidence that exists is their own ‘science’. What we are witnessing is the greatest example of policy-based evidence-making the world has ever seen. But though people have knuckled down and done their best this latest descent into deliberately managed economic self-harm is causing a greater depth of resentment than this generation of politicians can recall.
There is another approach. Look after those who are at the highest risk, and we know who they are, then free the energy and drive of the people of this country to do what they do best. To make a life for themselves, take responsibility for themselves, and by their efforts save themselves and the rest of us.
The name Reform UK may be anodyne. But my goodness, it is necessary.
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